ALSO BY SHARON WEINBERGER
A Nuclear Family Vacation
Imaginary Weapons
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2017 by Sharon Weinberger
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Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
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Names: Weinberger, Sharon, author.
Title: The imagineers of war : the untold history of DARPA, the Pentagon agency that changed the world / by Sharon Weinberger.
Other titles: Untold history of DARPA, the Pentagon agency that changed the world
Description: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016017245 (print) | LCCN 2016017718 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385351799 (hardcover) | Ebook ISBN 9780385351805
Subjects: LCSH: United States. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—History. | Military research—United States. | Military art and science—Technological innovations—United States. | Science and state—United States. | National security—United States—History. | United States—Defenses—History.
Classification: LCC U394.A75 W45 2016 (print) | LCC U394.A75 (ebook) | DDC 355/.040973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016017245
Ebook ISBN 9780385351805
Cover design by John Vorhees
First Edition
v4.1
a
For my father, Miles Weinberger
If there are to be yet unimagined weapons affecting the balance of military power tomorrow, we want to have the men and the means to imagine them first.
—JAMES KILLIAN,
science adviser to Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1956
Science as science should no longer be served; indeed scientists ought to be made to serve.
—WILLIAM H. GODEL,
former deputy director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, 1975
Contents
Cover
Also by Sharon Weinberger
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
PROLOGUE Guns and Money
PART I AN AGENCY FOR UNIMAGINED WEAPONS
CHAPTER 1 Scientia Potentia Est
CHAPTER 2 Mad Men
CHAPTER 3 Mad Scientists
CHAPTER 4 Society for the Correction of Soviet Excesses
CHAPTER 5 Welcome to the Jungle
CHAPTER 6 Ordinary Genius
CHAPTER 7 Extraordinary Genius
CHAPTER 8 Up in Flames
CHAPTER 9 A Worldwide Laboratory
CHAPTER 10 Blame It on the Sorcerers
CHAPTER 11 Monkey Business
CHAPTER 12 Bury It
CHAPTER 13 The Bunny, the Witch, and the War Room
PART II SERVANTS OF WAR
CHAPTER 14 Invisible War
CHAPTER 15 Top Secret Flying Machines
CHAPTER 16 Synthetic War
CHAPTER 17 Vanilla World
CHAPTER 18 Fantasy World
CHAPTER 19 Return of Voldemort
EPILOGUE Glorious Failure, Inglorious Success
Acknowledgments
Notes
Sources
Selected Bibliography
Illustration Credits
A Note About the Author
Illustrations
Prologue
Guns and Money
In June 1961, William Godel set off on a secret mission to Vietnam carrying a briefcase stuffed with cash. At a stopover in Hawaii, he converted some of the cash to traveler’s checks to make space for a small bottle of liquor that he carried with him on business trips. Even that did not quite leave enough room, so he moved some of his secret Pentagon papers to another case to make space for the bottle. The money, $18,000, was for a classified project that would play a critical role in President John F. Kennedy’s plan to battle communism in Southeast Asia.
At thirty-nine years old, Godel still wore the short buzz cut of his Marine Corps days, but his reputation had been forged in the world of intelligence. A drinker, a practical joker, and a master bureaucratic negotiator, Godel was the type of man who could one day offer to detonate a nuclear bomb in the Indian Ocean to make a crater for the National Security Agency’s new radio telescope and the next day persuade the president to launch the world’s first communications satellite to broadcast a Christmas greeting. Colleagues described him as someone you could drop in a foreign country, and a few months later he would emerge with signed agreements in hand, whether it was for secret radar tracking stations—something he did indeed set up in Turkey and Australia—or, in this case, winning the support of South Vietnam’s president for a new American proposal. Bill Bundy, a former CIA official and White House adviser, called Godel an “operator” with a “rather legendary reputation for effectiveness” working overseas.
At five feet ten inches tall, Godel was not a physically imposing figure, but he had a way of impressing both admirers and enemies with his presence. “He was one of the more glamorous people to stride the halls of the Pentagon,” recalled Lee Huff, who was recruited by Godel to the Defense Department. Godel was never the most famous man in the Pentagon, but for several years he was one of its most influential. And by the early 1960s, that influence was focused on Southeast Asia.
Godel arrived to the summer heat of Saigon, a congested city of semi-controlled chaos where cycle rickshaws, bicycles, mopeds, cars, and other motorized contraptions wove through the packed streets like schools of fish in a sea. The city was booming economically and culturally, even as it attracted an increasing number of American military advisers, spooks, and diplomats, who were looking to advise South Vietnam’s president on how best to run his newly independent country.
Parisian-style sidewalk cafés still dotted the main city streets, and the city’s French colonial heritage was reflected in everything from the fresh baguettes in the local bakeries to the city’s grand villas. Vietnamese women dressed in the áo dài, the formfitting silk dress worn over pantaloons, mixed easily with teenage girls clad in miniskirts. It was still several years before the influx of American troops would provide a boon to the city’s brothels, or frequent Vietcong terrorist attacks in Saigon would drive patrons away from sidewalk cafés, but signs of that unrest were on the horizon. In December of the previous year, the Vietcong bombed the kitchen of the Saigon Golf Club, marking the start of a series of terrorist attacks in the capital. In neighboring Laos, a civil war fueled by Soviet and American involvement was spilling over into Vietnam. More disquieting was that the Vietcong, the communist insurgents in South Vietnam, were getting weapons from North Vietnam, using the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the illicit supply route that snaked through Vietnam’s mountains and jungle, and parts of Laos.
Godel had been traveling frequently to Vietnam for more than a decade. What made this trip unusual was that he was now working for the Advanced Research Projects Agency, known by its acronym, ARPA. Founded in 1958 to get America into space after the Soviets launched the world’s first artificial satellite, ARPA had lost its space mission after less than two years. Now the young organization, hated by the military and distrusted by the intelligence community, was struggling to find a new role for itself. Godel figured if ARPA could not battle the communists in space, perhaps it could beat them in the jungles.
President Kennedy had taken offic
e just five months prior and was still in the process of formulating a new policy for Southeast Asia. He had already decided to support South Vietnam’s anticommunist president, Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic who hailed from a family of Mandarins, the bureaucrats who ran Vietnam under Chinese rule. The month before Godel’s trip, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson visited South Vietnam’s president, calling Diem the “Winston Churchill of Asia,” and in April, Kennedy sent four hundred Green Berets to South Vietnam to serve as special advisers, helping to train the South Vietnamese military and the Montagnards, the indigenous tribes who lived in the country’s central plains. Diem was a deeply religious man, a lifelong bachelor who chose politics over the priesthood. Some in Western circles regarded him as an out-of-touch crackpot; others, like Godel, saw him as a flawed but promising leader.
In the early 1960s, South Vietnam was already battling a communist insurgency, but it was a war being fought in the shadows; that summer, astronauts and celebrities still dominated the covers of Life and Time magazines. Yet there were hints that this new conflict was beginning to occupy America’s leaders in Washington. The October 27, 1961, cover of Life magazine featured a soldier peering out from jungle underbrush with the caption “GI trains for guerilla warfare.” The cover lines read, “Vietnam: Our Next Showdown.” Guerrilla warfare was precisely why Godel was in Vietnam. The money he carried with him to Saigon was a down payment on an initial $20 million that the American government expected to allocate for a combat center to develop technology suited for fighting insurgents in Vietnam’s jungles. Located in Saigon and run by ARPA, the combat center would be used to help American military advisers and South Vietnam’s military. Godel, however, was not just focused on Vietnam; ARPA’s Combat Development and Test Center was the starting point for a global solution to counterinsurgency, relying on science and technology to guide the way.
The cash in Godel’s bag, and his list of proposals for Diem, would alter the course of events in Vietnam and more broadly lay the groundwork for modern warfare. From stealthy helicopters that would slip over the border of Pakistan on a hunt for Osama bin Laden to a worldwide campaign using drones to conduct targeted killings, Godel’s wartime experiments would later become military technologies that changed the way America wages war. His programs in Vietnam, many of which arose from that meeting with Diem, would be credited with some of the best and worst military innovations of the century. Within just a few months of that trip, Godel would bring over to Vietnam a new gun better suited for jungle warfare, the Armalite AR-15. He would also send social scientists to Vietnam, hoping that a better understanding of the people and culture would stem the insurgency. Some of Godel’s work became infamous, like a plan to relocate Vietnamese peasants to new fortified villages, known as strategic hamlets. That plan became one of the more resounding failures of the war. Similarly, ARPA’s introduction to Vietnam of chemical defoliants, including Agent Orange, is now held responsible for countless deaths and illnesses among Vietnamese and Americans.
At its height, the ARPA program he established employed hundreds of people spread across Southeast Asia—more than five hundred in Thailand alone—and then expanded later to the Middle East. The program sought to understand the roots of insurgency and develop methods to prevent it so that American forces would not have to get involved in regional wars they were unprepared to fight. ARPA developed new technologies, sponsored social science research, and published books on counterinsurgency warfare that would later influence a new generation of military leaders fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than any single technology, Godel’s single-minded promotion of the need to understand the nature of guerrilla warfare would have an impact decades later, when the army general David Petraeus, and his advisers known as the “strategic whizzes,” found themselves studying the writing of David Galula, whose seminal work, Pacification in Algeria, was published in 1963, paid for by ARPA. Four decades before Petraeus made “counterinsurgency” a household phrase, Godel created a worldwide research program dedicated to insurgent warfare that dwarfed anything done in the years after 9/11.
The nascent counterinsurgency program Godel started inadvertently played a critical role in shaping the future agency whose name would become synonymous with innovation. The Vietnam counterinsurgency work eventually became the backbone of ARPA’s Tactical Technology Office, the seminal division that would produce stealth aircraft, precision weaponry, and drones—the fundamentals of the modern battlefield. The space age might have given birth to ARPA, but Vietnam thrust the agency into the center of Cold War strategic debates, and it was Godel, more than any other ARPA official, who shaped the agency’s future.
Yet it was not all counterinsurgency. In the early 1960s, the esoteric agency Godel helped build was planting the seeds for work that would bear fruit many years later. In the first two years, Godel helped create the agency’s space program, providing cover to the world’s first reconnaissance satellite, a top secret project. He also persuaded the president to launch the world’s first communications satellite and helped build a worldwide network for nuclear test monitoring. By the end of the decade, a descendant of one of ARPA’s first projects, the Saturn rocket, would launch Neil Armstrong and the other Apollo 11 astronauts on their journey to the moon. And just a month before Godel traveled to Vietnam, ARPA was handed a new assignment in command and control, which would in less than a decade grow into the ARPANET, the predecessor to the modern Internet. The following year, Godel personally signed off on the first computer-networking study, giving it money from his Vietnam budget.
Godel’s seminal role was largely expunged from the record in later years, and his name rarely mentioned in official materials, forgotten except by a few loyal friends and dedicated enemies. The AR-15, the weapon that Godel personally carried over to Vietnam, eventually became the M16, the standard-issue infantry weapon for the entire U.S. military. The rest of Godel’s Vietnam-era work would be dismissed as a onetime diversion for an agency now more closely associated with high technology than strategic thinking. His story did not fit an agency touted as a model for innovation. Yet the real key to the ARPA legacy lies in understanding how all these varied projects—satellites, drones, and computers—could come to exist in a single agency.
—
The Central Intelligence Agency sits on a compound in Langley, Virginia, made famous by countless movies and television shows. The NSA’s massive headquarters is ringed by barbed wire and located on a military base in Maryland. Yet the agency responsible for some of the most important military and civil technologies of the past hundred years resides in relative obscurity behind a generic glass facade at 675 North Randolph Street in Arlington, Virginia. The unremarkable office tower stands across from a dying four-level brown-brick shopping mall that houses a mix of fast-food restaurants and discount stores.
Behind the nondescript exterior of the office building, just beyond the guards, is a panoramic wall display that covers more than fifty years of the agency’s history. It begins in the fall of 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the first man-made satellite into orbit. Sputnik, as the satellite was called in the West, did little more than emit a simple beep. But that beach-ball-size sphere orbiting harmlessly around the earth touched off a storm of news reports that shook the American people’s feeling of invulnerability by demonstrating that the Soviet Union might soon be able to launch a nuclear-armed missile that could reach the continental United States.
As the story goes, Sputnik sparked a national hysteria, and the American public demanded that the government take action. In response, President Dwight Eisenhower in early 1958 authorized the establishment of a central research agency independent from the military services, whose bickering had contributed to the Soviet Union’s lead in space. This new agency, called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, was the nation’s first space agency—established eight months before the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA. The organization today known as DARPA—the D for “Defense”
was added in 1972 (and then dropped, and added again in later years)—has grown into an approximately $3-billion-a-year research agency, with projects that have ranged from space planes to cyborg insects. The display in the lobby is a monument to more than fifty years of this unusual government agency, which has produced marvelous and sometimes terrifying technological achievements: precision weapons, drones, robots, and networked computing, to name a few.
By thinking about fundamental problems of national security, DARPA created solutions that did far more than give the military a few novel weapons. In some cases, the agency changed the nature of warfare; in others, it helped prevent the nation from going to war. By thinking about how to deal with Soviet conventional military superiority without resorting to nuclear weapons, it introduced the era of precision weaponry. By looking for ways to detect underground nuclear explosions, it revolutionized the field of seismology and enabled the negotiation of critical arms control treaties. And by exploring ways to improve nuclear command and control, it created the ARPANET, the precursor to the modern Internet.
Not all solutions are so tidy, however. In trying to tackle the problem of communist insurgency, DARPA embarked on a decade-long worldwide experiment that ended in failure. It is tempting to carve out unsuccessful work, like the counterinsurgency programs, by claiming this was an aberration in the agency’s history. This book argues, however, that DARPA’s Vietnam War work and the ARPANET were not two distinct threads but rather pieces of a larger tapestry that held the agency together. What made DARPA successful was its ability to tackle some of the most critical national security problems facing the United States, unencumbered by the typical bureaucratic oversight and uninhibited by the restraints of scientific peer review. DARPA’s history of innovation is more closely tied to this turbulent period in the 1960s and early 1970s, when it delved into questions of nuclear warfare and counterinsurgency, than to its brief life as a “space agency.” Those two crucial decades represent a time when senior Pentagon officials believed the agency should play a critical role in shaping world events, rather than just develop technological novelties.
The Imagineers of War Page 1